December 16, 2014
UW English Professor David Shields’ views debated in The New Yorker
David Shields
David Shields, UW professor and New York Times best-selling author, was at the center of a Dec. 2 article by Adelle Waldman in The New Yorker titled “An Answer to the Novel’s Detractors.” Waldman places Shields among those detractors, but does not entirely disagree with him.
“It’s no coincidence that many of the most exciting novels to have appeared in recent years … have been distinctly un-novelistic,” Waldman wrote, “featuring protagonists who share many biographical details (and sometimes names) with the authors, and substituting the messiness of experience for conventional plots.”
This approach, she added, makes Shields’ 2010 book “Reality Hunger” “seem prescient.”
She wrote, “Shields’ points are worth considering again, both because he is laudably serious about what literature ought to aim for and because his ideas about the novel are so firmly entrenched in contemporary literary culture. Shields’ belief that the traditional novel is dated and that the way forward — aesthetically, if not commercially — lies in non-novels or at least non-traditional novels now represents the fashionable position in the literary world.”
Waldman also quoted a comment from Shields on the relative uselessness of fiction: “The world exists. Why recreate it?”
“About most novels, Shields is certainly right; even most ‘literary novels’ are undoubtedly nothing more than a means of entertainment suited to the pretensions of a certain type of reader, with little that is meaningful to say about the human condition. But the novel is a different matter.”
Shields took the matter in stride. “It’s essentially quite an honor that five years after my book is published, a critic in The New Yorker takes many pages to explore its lasting effect,” he wrote in an email.
Shields is the author of 16 books. His next book, “I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel,” written with his former UW student Caleb Powell, will be published by Knopf and released as a feature film, directed by James Franco, in 2015.
